BOY’S LIFE
What Boy’s Life never taught was how to get Dad out of the office on a Saturday to go fishing in the first place. Nor did Boy’s Life (or the Boy Scouts, for that matter) do a particularly good job of informing us of the importance of male friendships. Howard Korder’s flawless comedy Boy’s Life is about the painful time in men’s lives when they discover that giving up childish things means drifting away from their male friends. The play begins with three friends in their late 20s–Don, Jack, and Phil–hanging out together, wasting the evening away, just as they’ve wasted thousands of evenings before this. Jack tortures Don by asking him to “Name three things that happened in the 1970s,” while Phil, oblivious, listens to Emerson, Lake, and Palmer on his Walkman (“I haven’t heard this since college, you know?”).
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Don: We’d be nowhere.
Jack: It’s food for thought.
Every scene in the play works, every actor in the cast seems well-suited to the part he or she plays. Even, believe it or not, the scene changes are fun. Director Neil Wilson has done a good job steering the production away from baby-boomer stereotypes. Not an easy thing to do in a play as full of trendy, contemporary references as this one–everything from pasta class and anorexia nervosa to Elvis Costello and Eddie Haskell.
